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How Gentrification Saved Harlem
Recently homeowners in my corner of Harlem held a soiree in someone's garden. We are a hot group of 130 people representing the neighborhood change – Black veterans with a growing number of whites. Everyone brought a dish or bottle and the talk over the macaroni was gay. Does anyone know a good contractor? How did the Little League do this summer? A door prize, a box of Godiva chocolates, claimed to the longest resident – Dina Morrison, 93, who has lived with her older sister in the same place for 67 years. No executions mentioned.
The exclusion crisis? What crisis? Not in Harlem.
Harlem is full of the kind of people who are losing their properties throughout New York, namely, old and families African American working class. But the black capital of the nation has been isolated from the sub-prime crisis that often blamed for the destruction of communities of color – gentrification.
While the dreaded G word has a price some residents out of the neighborhood, we have seen a rise paradoxical. The value of housing, which have skyrocketed in recent 15 years in Harlem scared off many predatory lenders who targeted other black areas. These price tags $ 1 million-plus-owners have also who are struggling to keep up with mortgage payments the option of selling before the bank closes in.
"It tends to be a close relationship between property values and foreclosures, "says Josiah Madar, Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University.
He and other experts understand little about the mechanisms of predatory lending, which is not very marked racial component. Eight of the ten top neighborhoods hit by foreclosures in the city are mostly nonwhite. A map represents the most affected areas – including Bedford-Stuyvesant, East New York, North Bronx, South Jamaica – says it all. Each presentation is a point, and the above areas appear solid metastatic cancer, with several hundred foreclosures each.
Without But the area that includes Hamilton Heights, which says some of the most precious Victorian brownstones of Harlem, there were only eight notices of foreclosures, a very few can discern the individual specks.
It seems that the crooks who besieged other black neighborhoods steered away from Harlem, betting that anyone who lived in a house value would be too financially sophisticated tricks. Unlike the outer districts in which racial demographic is similar but smaller value of the home, residents Harlem did not report a shower of leaflets pushed through mail slots promising zero interest rates. Scammers seeking people to take excessive given to not approach Harlem as aggressively. Check out the numbers. Only 0.8 percent of all purchases of home mortgages in the Hamilton Heights area in 2006 were high risk, compared with 34 percent in Bedford-Stuyvesant and 39 percent in eastern New York. (EDITORS – These are the latest figures available.) Loans refinancing risk lenders were also down here.
"It was all a matter of the alleged predators," said Dwayne Jones, loan principal Parodneck Foundation, an advocacy group housing. "They did not come to Harlem." He recognizes the great concentration of organizations like yours, and social networks such as the association of our homeowners, to educate less experienced members of the community.
Those Harlemites they did borrow more than they actually owned it could take the money and run. That is what our next-door neighbor did. Literally a week before the bank jumped to possess townhouse 1888, sold the property for a nice package for a white family and found something cheaper. Of course, you can not move, but was spared financial ruin.
The positive aggregate effect is that properties like yours do not sit vacant for long foreclosure process in New York. We see a vicious circle in the areas affected by foreclosure, "where the empty houses to sink the cost of people nearby. As anyone who has lived days Harlem ghetto knows, nobody wants to live next to a building with tables that tempt drug dealers to roam. Moreover, few people want to buy a building with a rose leaking roof, which is often the case as banks rarely remain the property seized.
This does not mean that gentrification is great for everyone. Of course, has its downside. Harlemites Most apartments rent and not live in luxury homes. The place is losing its status as the last bastion of affordability in Manhattan. Those who suffer are victims not of white professionals who buy shells and set up. No, the destructive forces are the major promoters who collect rent stabilized apartment buildings and then try to force tenants to make improvements and raise the price. Some of these investors paid more than the value of their property, and now the risk of default. So what happens to the residents living on the premises?
For now, however, homeowners like Dina Morrison are in a good place. There is talk among the owners of a jolly Christmas party, like all the years of plenty.
© 2008 Judith Matloff
About the Author
Judith Matloff is the author of Home Girl — Building a Dream House on a Lawless Block (Random House.)
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